Advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems (NEMS), Photonic, as well as any devices or systems employing Micro- and Nano-Fabricated technology in their implementation promise to revolutionize many products by bringing together the computational capability of microelectronics with the perception and control capabilities of miniaturized sensors, actuators, and other devices, thereby enabling smart systems-on-a-chip to be mass-produced. The use of smart systems that can actively and autonomously sense and control their environments has far reaching implications for a tremendous number of future military and industrial applications, and promises significant benefits for the economy and citizens. Several commercial products using these technologies have reached the marketplace, due in large part to focused and sustained investment. Nevertheless, these products are mostly limited to a few high volume markets in a few selected application domains, due to the enormous cost and time it takes to develop a manufacturing process using these technologies. Consequently, the true potential of these technologies is still unfulfilled for various low volume applications. Additionally, even for high-volume markets, the time and cost it takes to develop and take a device into production, as well as the unpredictability of such time and cost, makes commercialization of technologies that rely on customer micro- and nano-fabrication unattractive and risky.
As a result of the enormous cost (e.g., tens to hundreds of millions of dollars) and time (e.g., 3 years or more) it has traditionally taken for products based on these technologies to be designed, developed and reach the marketplace, even the very large volume markets have shown an unattractive return on investment. This is largely the result of the need to design and implement (from individual process steps) a separate and customized process sequence for each new device and/or system design. For small volume markets, access to these important technologies is thus limited. Therefore, a new approach for implementation is needed (in both development and manufacturing) to allow developers to focus on innovative designs and applications rather than spending time and money developing unique process sequences for every device. This new approach will allow devices and systems to be developed much more quickly, brought to market faster, and at lower cost.
A major obstacle in the implementation of devices and systems employing these technologies is the lack of properly defined and standardized fabrication toolsets for the implementation of development prototypes as well as in production. One consequence of not having these fabrication standards is that the only viable approach available for development is to create a fully customized process sequence for each device. Additionally, it also may be necessary to develop individual processing steps in the process sequence, thereby increasing cost even more. Indeed, the inevitable and undesirable outcome of this approach is that these endeavors are prohibitively costly, time consuming, and much more risky than desirable.
The present invention can be used to radically accelerate the development of devices using these technologies and is scalable with production volume. For manufacturing purposes, fabrication process sequences for devices must be reproducible and repeatable, and simultaneously have sufficient flexibility so that they can be used for many different device types without significantly diminishing resulting device performance. The kernel of the present invention is a comprehensive set of general purpose (and reusable) “process modules” or “process building blocks” that can be used and reused effectively for a broad array of different device types, thus providing elements of a toolset for streamlining the creation of process sequences. By taking advantage of reusable process building blocks, device development can be undertaken in a much shorter period of time, with a considerably higher return on investment, and with lower risk levels. Importantly, this proposed solution is applicable to MEMS, NEMS, photonics, etc., as well as other technology domains that employ a large diversity of materials and processing techniques and which also require customized or semi-customized process sequences, such as microelectronics, nanotechnology and heterogeneous integration, including 3-dimensional integration.
Consequently, it is extremely desirable to have the means to be able to transition these advanced technologies from their present state of an “art form” practiced by a few select experts to a much more desirable state where fabrication for both development and production can be standardized and commoditized. The present invention enables the design for manufacturability for these technologies, whereby design and process rules can be built around these standardized process modules, thereby allowing device design and fabrication to be de-coupled, in a manner similar to what has evolved in Very-Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design of microelectronics. The impact of the present invention is to unleash the enormous potential of these technologies, much as what happened when microelectronics implementation became standardized and commoditized.